FAILING the admittedly unlikely privatisation solution to our most besetting problem, the wretched state of public education, the next best solution is to completely revamp the way we educate our youth in our public schools.

If this were to involve the scrapping of the present Ministry and its replacement by a small group of rational professionals, so much the better. It should be designed to train minds and instil discipline, neither of which is high on the present Ministry's To Do list.

Political indoctrination should be entirely abandoned. Students should be sent home at the end of the day with enough homework to keep them (and at least to some extent, their parent or parents) busy and off the streets. Failure to do this homework should result in the kind of discipline that would strongly discourage repeated failure to do it.

The second remedy for our besetting problem is to deal with the collapse of any kind of discipline in both home and school. Youth thrives on discipline and disintegrates with the lack of it. We have abandoned it completely. Why it has been abandoned can be answered in any number of ways, most of them probably correct. Among other things it is the nearly total abdication of responsibility on the part of both parents and schools.

In the gap between children, who may yet be rescued, and those adults for whom anything other than jail is already probably too late, lies that amorphous group of older children and young adults known today as "The Youth". It seems to be among these youth that the horrifying surge in incidents of bloody violence and gangsterism is occurring. Teenage girls are now stabbing other teenage girls. Boys are beating other boys with baseball bats or slicing them up in hand to hand combat with machetes.

Many of them are robbing Bermudians and visitors alike with conscienceless brutality. This is seriously undermining the sustainability of our development. We must bend our minds to any available methods to counter this explosion of violence. This will be far from easy. Violence in the American ideology is the universal staple. It pervades everything like a bloody, red tide of gore.

It is no wonder that violence is now as pervasive in life as on the big and little screens. Fifty and more years ago violence was so rare in Bermuda as to deeply shock and distress Bermudian social mores on the rare occasions on which it occurred. It was met, as a rule, with like punishment.

Today a man can run down his wife with his motorbike, rev up its engine to burn and shred her skin with its tyres and leave her damaged and bleeding on the road in front of her children and be effectively let off with nothing more than a conditional discharge. What this judicial outrage says to our youth is that violence is here to stay; be prepared to defend yourself against it. If you don't go on the attack first, Government will not even try to defend you.

only obvious way to counter this wave of violence is to meet it with violence, not with a conditional discharge. It is reliably claimed that when the "cat" or the birch was the standard punishment for crimes of this kind of violence in Bermuda there was never once a recidivist.

People who resort to violence are those whose minds respond only to violence as has been emphasised tragically in the Liburd murder trial. Civilisation has completely passed them by. If violence is what registers with them, so be it.

Violence is what they will understand and corporal punishment or at least a long period of hard labour is what must be the response to crimes of violence. Interminable incarceration is the only alternative. Nothing else has been proven to be successful.

Discipline and a rational curriculum must be reintroduced in our schools even if discipline remains tragically absent in so many of our homes. If this means back-tracking on the feel-good policies adopted by educational theorists in recent times, so be it. Those theories have been marked by spectacular failure.

Our children are less well educated than they were 50 years ago, let alone a century ago. They also suffer from an almost total lack of discipline. Society is suffering acutely from this pervasive evil in educational policies and will continue to suffer as long as we leave ourselves at the mercy of self-serving educational theorists.

Self-esteem is more readily achieved by meeting and overcoming challenges than by lowering the bar to the achievement level of the lowest common denominator. The Bermuda Regiment also needs to be completely rethought and restructured. As a defence force it is clearly without value. As a showpiece for official ceremonial it is remarkably good.

If it were restructured as something akin to a coast guard with responsibility for guarding our shores, policing our waters, and protecting our fisheries it would have an obvious value that would probably increase the number of volunteers. The youth could see some value in such a service. It might even be seen to have a little excitement about it that marching to and fro and playing at soldiers with outdated equipment and methods does not.

Such a force could still provide the necessary ceremonial presence on state occasions while it would otherwise be seen to be doing something practical, useful and even fun instead of skulking around in the Warwick dunes or marching about aimlessly in the heat. Discipline is always more easily instilled when the method used is seen to be both useful and interesting to those subject to it.

Whatever we do must be done with dispatch.

What we are doing now has been a conclusively proven failure. We are already failing the third or fourth generation of our youth and haven?t had the sense or even the interest to see or care that we are failing.

The same old spineless, feel-good ideas are clearly bankrupt and must be jettisoned completely. The bleeding heart notion that any criminal act is blameable not on the perpetrator but on the society that spawned him is no more or less true now than it ever was. Our problem is that the notion, right or wrong, is failing society. It is failing abjectly.

If we are to sustain the development we have already achieved our youth must be taught to think clearly and to be able to express what they think with clarity. This can only be done with discipline. It is time to stop teaching them what to think in favour of teaching them how to think.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste and our public education system is presently wasting the minds of our youth in a way that is demonstrably destroying the fabric of society in Bermuda. Radical change is essential.

Without it we will be throwing the development we already have out the window.

We could do a lot worse than to look at the educational regimes of the Far East for a model. Its schools seem to manage to produce skilled minds, ambitious youth, disciplined people and national work ethics that leave the modern west floundering in the dust. If we are to flourish in the global economy of international business it is the peoples of the Far East against whom we will have to compete. At present, we are completely unprepared to do so.

And it has recently become alarmingly apparent that it is not only our youth who are unprepared to sustain the development already in place. It is also the most basic aspects of our infrastructure. Government, notorious for its unwillingness to maintain what we have because such expenditure isn?t glamorous and is thought not to get votes, has allowed our provision for water, the absolute rock-bottom, basic necessity of life, to deteriorate beyond the point of safety.

Six weeks of drought is nothing unusual. A number of droughts in the past have lasted considerably longer. At the end of the most recent drought we were only two inches of rain short for the year, at the start of the drought we were almost four inches ahead.

Yet water truckers couldn't get water; some of their customers couldn't be serviced for weeks; Watlington / Government water pressure dropped drastically. Much of this surprise crisis is apparently caused by poor tank maintenance by Government and inadequate advance planning in terms of new water treatment plants. The huge development the island has seen in the last ten years has only been matched by total inactivity and culpable neglect on the part of Government.

the only notable bit of advance planning is a recent requirement for the building of new homes to provide tank capacity commensurate with roof area. This doesn't, of course, take into consideration the people capacity of the house under the roof. A three-storey residence with six bedrooms is only required to have the same tank capacity as a one-storey cottage with two bedrooms with the same roof area. At best this is only a half-measure.

Concrete plans for dealing with our obvious water deficiency, complete with a rational cost accounting, must be introduced with minimum delay. It should be followed by the necessary implementation. "Initiatives" to talk about the problem followed by an "agenda" to discuss it some more won't cut the mustard.

The electricity crisis precipitated by the fire at Belco remains ongoing and it isn't at all clear when, if at all, the island will return to a reasonably stable electrical supply. As a private company Belco seems to have exercised remarkable foresight in keeping up with the greatly increased demand brought about by the rapid expansion of international business and the residential needs that have accompanied it.

On the face of it, however, the electricity crisis in the city of Hamilton seems to have been far more serious and sustained than that outside it.

The economic fall-out will eventually become clear; what is already obvious is that the commercial heart of the island, upon which the prosperity of all of us depends, appears to have been a bad third on Belco's list of priorities. Belco's forward planning must involve working many years in advance of present realities.

the additional generative power and the supply networks necessary to sustain the kind of rapid development the island has recently seen might well have been beyond ordinary business foresight, even though Belco's foresight in the past has been at least adequate to the occasion and probably better than that. It may well be that the very rapid, almost uncontrolled development in the last ten years was, in some measure at least, not foreseen.

This presents us with the so far unanswered questions: was the development of the last ten years controlled at all? If it was, was Belco kept within the decision-making loop? If Belco was informed, but feared it could not keep up with anticipated demand, why was not the rapid economic growth slowed to keep development sustainable with adequate electrical power?

The same questions apply to water supplies. It would seem that in the early stages of the development of international business the United Bermuda Party Government was negligent in its forward planning. In the rapid acceleration of the larger physical presence of international business in the last ten years the Progressive Labour Party Government seems to have been equally negligent, with the added culpability of neglecting the proper maintenance of the island's existing physical infrastructure.

We are now presented with a hospital crisis with a frightening time line.

Any ordinary person's ear-to-the-ground hearsay about conditions at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital will have suggested some years ago that serious attention should have been paid to the problem. It wasn't. Band-aid solutions to pressing crises were thought adequate. Now we have another major crisis, one moreover that is threatening our scarce and invaluable open spaces.

Without adequate health care on the island the climate for those manning our international businesses will further deteriorate. It was bad enough that they were unable to do much in the way of business for four days while they were without electricity; it will be worse still if their executives and staff cannot get the rudiments of adequate medical care.

We have been remarkably well served by our hospital for a very isolated small town of 60,000 people. We are now suddenly faced with the threat of its collapse unless radical, environmentally damaging action is taken immediately.

Once again we are being stared in the face by the failure of our Government even to consider the need to sustain the development they not only allowed, but also encouraged. One may digress for a moment to consider what the present Government has actually done while it was failing to sustain our rapid economic development. It has been building a huge school that has overrun its schedule for completion and its budget by something in excess of 100 per cent.

Quite recently we were assured that another huge, expensive school, CedarBridge, would be sufficient to take care of all the secondary public school requirements of the island for many years to come. Given the appalling state of public education in the island, the people swallowed CedarBridge as an unpleasant but apparently necessary expense. Education has yet to improve to match the plant provided. So, why Berkeley? Clearly there was no pressing need for a huge new school so soon after CedarBridge was built ? ostensibly to take care of all such needs for many years.

The answer to this almost never-asked question seems to be vanity. The Old Boys and Girls of Berkeley (a substantial voice in Cabinet) didn?t want their alma mater to vanish in the dust of CedarBridge.

Vanish it hasn't. As yet untold millions have been spent and wasted on an extravagant school for which there was no apparent need. And this all happened while the water supply was deteriorating and the electrical needs of the island were being outpaced by uncontrolled development.

Neglect of the necessities to sustain development hasn't been confined to water and electricity alone. The roads infrastructure of the island has also been ignored. Periodic bleats about cutting traffic volume has been overwhelmed by the introduction of still larger cars and more of them for politicians. No effort has been made by Government to set an example. Thus it is hard to complain about business executives who maintain company vans as their personal private vehicles. The only limit on the number of vehicles on the roads is now the number of licensed drivers to drive them.

No effort has been made to discourage office development to the west of Hamilton, with its punishing effects on through Hamilton traffic, let alone on an inadequate sewage disposal system. No effort has been made to improve traffic flow anywhere at all in the last eight or ten years.

Some of this can be laid at the door of Government's unwillingness to pay for the needed maintenance of existing facilities; some of it is, of course, the result of the NIMBY outcries. These complaints introduce, once again, the question of whether Bermudians really want the rush of development they have already seen.

Yet another aspect of our unwillingness to deal with the physical problems directly bearing on our ability to sustain already existing development was demonstrated by Hurricane Fabian. Almost the entire island was cut off from its airport. This was not the first time the Causeway has been swept away in a hurricane and, given the long-term forecasts now available, it certainly won't be the last. We are already in the most violent hurricane season on record.

No plans, however, not even an "initiative" or an "agenda" to construct a vitally needed second bridge or, better, a tunnel between the main island and St. George's has been mentioned. It is as though Fabian had never happened.

effort has been made to improve public transport, but not nearly enough. If we are not to die of hardening of the arteries of our inadequate road and transport systems a viable alternative to private vehicles must be produced.

This must not only be satisfactory for moving large numbers of people to and from their places of work, it must also allow people to get to and from their market, to move their children to and from school, to get a lawn-mower to its service provider, to go to a doctor or a dentist, and almost any other regular need. In our transition from tourist destination to financial and insurance hub we are going to move inevitably from a countryside island to a cityscape island and we will need something alarmingly like a subway system to cope with the new Bermuda so rapidly overwhelming us.

Miserably, however, our planning has excluded the city of Hamilton from adapting to these new requirements. Development has been allowed almost unrestricted west and more recently east of the city along the harbour, but it is still harshly limited where it is obviously most needed in the city itself. The amalgamation of lots should be encouraged. Large office buildings should rise within the city, not around it.

The whole of the central Pembroke valley, surrounding what will eventually become a beautiful park, could and should be developed as eight- to 12-storey offices, condominiums and apartment blocks before any more are built anywhere else at all. The present owners of small lots in these areas should and could be enabled to profit substantially from such development.

Stupidly, however, we seem to be concentrating only on the preservation of a pie-in-the-sky "revitalisation" of Court Street and a tourist's eye-view of the cathedral. New entertainment locations, restaurants and markets must be included in such a plan so that people can reach them on foot from the new condominiums and apartments.

Incredibly, Government admits to there being in excess of 8,000 work permit holders in the island now. All of them need to be housed. All of them need to get to and from work. All of them must get their children to school, buy their groceries and find whatever entertainment they find suitable. All of them do it in an infrastructure that was not entirely adequate 20 years ago. Almost nothing has been done to improve that infrastructure in those 20 years.

Even more incredibly, the same Government "anticipates" that there will be additional 8,000 work permits issued by the end of this decade five years from now. Yet this same Government, after seven years of doing almost nothing except producing long-winded verbosity, shows absolutely no sign of doing a single thing to accommodate this influx.